De kogel is door de kerk. After years of focussing entirely on Gtk+ and GNOME, Ubuntu will finally start evaluating Qt applications for inclusion in the defaukt Ubuntu installation. Mark Shuttleworth announced the policy change on his blog today.

Novell (who have a patent agreement with Microsoft) even supply mono development tools to Visual Studio developers ... there is no way Microsoft are now going to start patent infrigments proceedings on Novell.

This Anti-MONO FUD is fuelled more by a hatred towards Microsoft than anything else.

You lack history. History tell you that something is strange. Visual Studio plugin was free and open source at one point. Why is it not now.

Novel MS patent agreement has to be renewed at end of this year. Not renewed no more patent coverage. With the sale of Novell MS might have no reason to renew. Due to the fact MS might become a part owner of all of Novell patents so unable to ever be attacked by them.

Also Mono has been systematically getting rid of GPL and LGPL from there source code base swaping to a license that does not legally contain any clauses to promise patent protection.

Lot of the mistrust comes from the Fat long filename patents. MS waited 8 year to spring those on companies. So waiting out a 5 year agreement is not outside MS known wait time to attack.

MS has used Submarine Patents. Once bitten twice shy here.

Really key reason to be rid of mono from default mono install is performance on a livecd. Simply it suxs.

Reason why it suxs is Linux is designed to pull of a few simple tricks. Native programs are mapped to memory. Something that is mapped to memory Linux kernel does not need to use swapspace for if runs low on memory. In fact never uses swapspace for.

Mono simply creates more on the fly data that must be sent to swap to free up ram in case of running out. So forcing up the min ram requirement when you don't have swapspace. Ie most key time of not having swapspace a Livecd.

Really Mono and Java should both be limited preferably to harddrive installs and never ever found on a Livecd due to the overhead of both.

Only possible exception for java is using gcj to product native binaries for the livecd.